Evaluation Question 3

Question 3 Evaluation

1. How did you respond to the original brief with the audience in mind? Give details of audience research carried out at the planning stage.

During the planning stages, we firstly decided on a prominent genre in our group which was a Psychological Thriller. With the storyline in mind, we created a brief questionnaire to distribute to our target audience to evaluate our idea. We recorded their answers using the Sony HD 1000 camera and then placed it on YouTube. This allowed us to embed it onto our blog where we could then start the research stage. From our results we saw that our age rating was the right choice and that it was the correct genre choice as the audience mostly agreed with our genre choice. After these results we decided to research into camera shots, props, music all linked with our genre. When filming we ensured that we followed all conventions linked with our genre and to make sure we did this, we produced a rough cut of our film to ask the audience if we conformed to the conventions of this genre.

1. In filming and editing how did you ensure meaning would be apparent to the audience? What creative decisions did you make in planning, rehearsing, filming and editing that were influenced by your sense of the audience and how they might interpret your finished film?

Within the filming and editing we produced many ideas from camerawork to editing to portray things in certain ways. The way in which we wanted to portray the character was to feel like he was intoxicated and to show him as an alcoholic. Close-ups of the characters face were added to show the characters emotional distress and also the use of focus change was used in a point of view to create a blurred vision to portray the alcoholic affect that is on the character. As well as this when filming certain scenes for example the poker scene, it was too light and happy so we had to create a darker atmosphere by covering windows and other possible lighting issues. However this created an incorrect mood for our film as the lighting then changed orange which was resolved in the editing process as we colour corrected the shots using the colour wheel. Also in the poker scene we wanted to create a blurred memory so as the scene ended we used an overlapping effect and a change in opacity to portray a flashback.

c) How did the in audience respond when you trialled aspects of your film?

We created a rough cut to see how the audience would respond to the brief aspects of our film. We placed this on YouTube and produced a questionnaire to be able to evaluate and change some parts of the film which the audience felt weren’t relatable.

The audience feedback from the rough cut helped a lot in terms of testing our genre and if we portrayed the character in the right way. The audience described our character in all the right ways which showed that our rough cut demonstrated the right techniques to portray the character. As well as this we asked what the target audience is and if the plot was understandable. From the feedback it showed that our audience was both male and females. Also, it showed that our plot was understandable to the audience which helped us move forward with the film as we had already made the storyline understandable.